End of August Update - Further Improvements to the Map Editor

This update will be somewhat brief, since I've mostly been having to do unrelated freelance work to stay financially stable and thus have had less time for DORF, and Thomas was on vacation for 2 weeks, so this month was not marked by a huge amount of progress overall.

That said, we still did make great progress with the map editor in particular, which now has an extremely convenient addition of the multibrush tool, which allows for the extremely rapid placement of banal environmental objects (namely vegetation), which was extremely tedious to do before since each object had to be manually selected and placed. This is partially why, until now, a lot of maps are seemingly boring deserts with little in them.

As can be seen from the video above, the MultiBrush tool allows for the rapid placement of vegetation objects (among other things), with options for the types of vegetation, options for brush shapes and to flood an area, and the sparsity of placement within the brush or flood size. There are also options for creating brush types that contain multiple vegetation types; for example, in the video, there is the Desert Scrub option, which includes a variety of vegetation types - dry grasses, sagebrush, desert trees like Joshua Trees and Yucca, etc - and each type can have its % chance to be placed by the brush adjusted in the game's YAML files, so that grasses are more likely to be placed than trees. This allows for some very flexible and dynamic tooling that can be made quickly, and has a lot of potential for additional brush types, such as for brushes for quickly creating things like a tropical rainforest, a coniferous mountain forest, etc.

A lot of vegetation objects had to be created to supplement this tool, with many more still needing work. All in all there are nearly 50 vegetation types that have been created, with each one requiring 8-12 variants, times damaged, dead and burned variants as well, meaning many vegetation species have anywhere from 24 to 48 sprites. Note that, while many of these have been modeled out, most of them still need to have variants created (and animated, in the case of certain trees and their wind swaying animations) and be implemented into the game.

Take notice that the above trees aren't all necessarily to-scale with eachother, and some were blown up slightly to fit into the image. This image doesn't include a lot of the more boring vegetations as well, such as the grass and bush types.

As an aside, if you're wondering why we don't just use pre-made assets bought from an asset store for the vegetation, that's because it's a lot easier to create the shadowmeshes for these models if they are built with that in mind. Also as another little development fact, because the leaves on these trees are all individual triangles, many of these trees are extremely polygon dense, and the resulting Maya file took up over 5GB of space. To reduce the problems with performance, many of the Maya scene files were divided into smaller files categorized by vegetation type, such as ones for cacti, ones for palm trees, ones for coniferous trees, etc.

This may seem excessive, but does allow map makers to have a lot of potential in creating unique environments, where the biome comes less from the actual terrain pieces, and more from the vegetation types placed, and so making the climate into a tropical rainforest, savannah or alpine mountain will be made easier with all these options. These are all fully interactive too, as vegetation will include damaged and dead versions for when battles take their toll on the local flora, and will also include burned versions, as flames and explosions can create wildfires.

Next month, we hope to flesh out the map editor even further, adding new features line line-building tools for creating dirt roads and coastlines, and (hopefully) adding proper cliffs.

As always, thanks for the continued support.